AUSTIN — At the end of SXSW Interactive Festival's rainy first day, the focus fixed on a burgeoning movement that pairs two partners who normally are at odds: governments and hackers.

Their aim: transforming reams of government data into web applications that help citizens access government services.

One panelist described how civic hackers helped Chicago build an app that tracked where someone could get a flu shot.

Another talked about a group of Austin hackers that built a mobile app to help voters find their polling places at election time.

Abhi Nemani, an executive with Code for America, a nonprofit that aims to help cities turn their data into web resources, said the relationship between many governments and hackers is losing its confrontational edge. “Now it's collaborative,” Nemani said.

He described how his organization helped the city of New Orleans clean up data on blighted homes and developed an application that allowed citizens and city workers to put the data to work.

Panelist Matt Esquibel, a division manager with the city of Austin's IT department, said Code for America last year helped make the city's data more readily available.

“I would say that things are going really well in Austin, and I would give a lot of credit to our local group of hackers,” Esquibel said.

“I wouldn't say that the city of Austin is quite there yet — there is still a cultural shift that needs to happen. But I would say that the awareness is there now.”

This is the first year that SXSW has offered a track on civic engagement.

The five-day conference is a key event in the tech world, and organizers estimated that more than 27,000 people would pay to attend this year, up a bit from last year.

The civic hacking movement's increasing visibility is driven partly by the growing connectedness between people and their government, said Alexander Howard, a reporter for who covers government and transparency for O'Reilly Media in Washington, D.C.

“There is a really interesting group of people in the United States and around the world who do social coding now,” he said. “The most interesting stuff is not what they do on Twitter, it's what they do on GitHub” — a website that allows people to easily share the code they write.

Programmers in the movement haven't shied away from describing themselves as hackers despite the word's baggage.

“A lot of people are really happy calling themselves civic hackers and self-defining that way, and saying, 'Yeah, I'm hacking, I'm coding, I'm taking data and trying to make it useful and using it in new ways,'” Howard said.

“Lots of hacks (become) important. The world is full of hackers who wanted to scratch an itch, to solve a problem they had, and made something that turned out to be useful to lots of other people who had the same problem.”

The movement has grown dramatically over the last several years, spurred on by an increasing acceptance and growing availability of government data.

The Obama administration has launched its Open Government Initiative to make federal data more accessible to the public.

It held its first official “hackathon” in February, inviting programmers from around the country to work alongside members of its development team.

The city of Philadelphia hired Mark Headd from Code for America to serve as its chief data officer last August.

The regional transit authority — Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority — allows programmers to access reams of data and use it to develop apps that allow riders to track the location of trains and buses as well as system delays.

Civic hacking also has found itself in legally questionable territory at times, Howard said, highlighting the recent suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.

Swartz was charged in 2011 with hacking a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to download millions of articles from an online service that provides academic papers.

Before that, the FBI had investigated Swartz after he scraped millions of federal court filings from the court system's fee-based document system, known as PACER, and made them available for free.

Their push to develop apps and find uses for huge amounts of government data is adding legitimacy to the practice and could help shield it from potential prosecution, Howard said.

“You're better off working for the Times or the Texas Tribune. .. or some official organization if you're deciding to be scraping government websites than if you're on your own,” Howard said. nhicks@express-news.net